


Little Things Left Behind

by akaparalian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 19:36:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16001891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Five things Shiro left behind on Earth, plus Keith.





	Little Things Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic for Voltron Bingo! *throws confetti* I have a Sheith card, and this is for the "Abandonment" square. So. You know. Not exactly a bright and cheery prompt. :'D I'm really excited to keep working on this challenge; there are a few squares in particular that I'm SUPER looking forward to.
> 
> Title is from the Roger Eno track of the same name, which is one of those pieces that really makes me wish it was possible to somehow use audio clips as the titles of fics.
> 
> Enjoy!!

i.

There was a reason that, despite owning about four dozen novelty coffee mugs, Shiro always used to complain about never being able to find any when he needed one, and that reason was that he kept leaving them in the weirdest fucking places.

Seriously. In the first _week_ after the Kerberos mission took off, Keith found mugs:

\- nestled under a pile of dirty clothes on the floor;

\- under his bed — _his_ bed, not even Shiro’s;

\- in the library, returned to him by a dryly amused librarian who made him promise he’d keep them safe for Shiro until he got back;

\- sitting silently inside three separate microwaves (Keith’s, Shiro’s, and the one in the underused officers’ lounge that Shiro used to sneak him into all the time), each full of long-cold coffee that Shiro, at some nebulous point in the past, must have been intending to reheat. 

It was kind of depressing if he thought about it for too long, just another little bit of proof that Shiro was missing, cut out of the fabric of Keith’s life for the time being, and messily enough to leave all these hanging threads. But it was also kind of hilarious, and honestly, what with his best friend and primary source of emotional support jetting off to the far reaches of the solar system, Keith wasn’t exactly in the position to turn up his nose at a little amusement.

Shiro was still within easy communication distance at that point, and had listed Keith as one of the few people to whom the Garrison was to allot the privilege of talking to him — though only through weekly text transmissions, because the Garrison held over the old space race practices of being stingy as hell with that sort of thing — so Keith sent him a letter about it, describing which mugs he found where, telling Shiro he’d washed them all carefully and taken them to the storage locker where the rest of Shiro’s stuff — the entire contents of his apartment and a few other things besides — was waiting. He had packed all of the mugs carefully into a cardboard box and put them with the rest of the kitchen shit, so that when Shiro got back he’d know where to find them for once, and carefully tried to ignore exactly how domestic the whole thing felt. (He left that last part out of the letter. Obviously. But that didn’t mean it didn’t make his stomach buzz in that way he’d tried to teach himself to ignore.)

The influx of mugs slowed to a trickle, and then, finally, Keith found what he thought to be the last one, long after he’d sent Shiro the letter about the first bunch and gotten a somewhat sheepish message back, thanking him for taking care of it. It took nearly a month for that last mug to come to light, but then again, maybe that was because it was inside one of the sim pods — a kind of shitty one that Keith tried not to use all that often. Shiro, though, had always seemed to take the way the controls were in need of repair and usually fritzing out as a bit of a personal challenge _._ And there was one of his mugs, with a smiling cartoon cat on the side, just sitting there empty under the pilot’s seat like he’d only stepped out for a second and was going to come right back and sit down again.

ii.

Keith had been coveting Shiro’s cherry-red hoverbike basically since day one. Shiro teaching him how to ride it, the two of them chasing each other across the desert in the dim light of dozens of arid sunsets, the actual knowledge of the way the wind cut through his hair when he leaned over the windshield and the way Shiro laughed when he pulled a particularly ridiculous move — those things only ever exacerbated how much he wanted the damn thing, but no single one of them _created_ that desire.

He swore up and down that he’d take good care of it, that he’d be beyond obsessive about maintenance and that he’d _definitely_ not smash it across a canyon floor somewhere. Shiro had laughed him off, said as long as it was in roughly the same number of pieces when he got back, it would be good enough for him. But Keith took his promises seriously, and that went double for promises he made to Shiro.

iii.

Other than the bike, there were a few things Shiro didn’t trust to the storage locker, for whatever reason. Some of them Keith got — books and papers that stood some risk of getting moldy out there, anything particularly fragile, whatever. And then there was the rubber duck.

It was just a classic yellow rubber ducky, with those slightly vacant eyes and the weird, anthropomorphized smile that didn’t make any sense on a duck’s beak. But Shiro asked Keith to keep the duck safe, and Keith knew the thing about the duck and got what it meant, so there was really no other option but than to take it back to his dorm and set it carefully on the corner of his desk, in easy view from any point in the tiny little room, and make sure that no harm came to it.

(The thing about the duck was: it had been a gift from one of Shiro’s favorite teachers, way back in high school, before he even came to the Garrison. It had names scribbled all over it, the ink in various stages of fading off of its plastic body, and Keith knew the exact spot where Shiro planned to put his name on it, too. It had been passed down from holder to holder — Shiro’s teacher had gotten it when he was in university — and each person was meant to hold onto it until they achieved whatever their goal was, and then whenever they reached it, no matter how long it took, they wrote their name on the duck. And then, someday down the line, they passed it onto the next person, someone who they thought could use a companion on their journey. It had seen Shiro from high school to starting at the Garrison as a cadet to becoming an officer, and, he’d told Keith when he handed it over for safekeeping, when he got back from Kerberos, he was finally going to put his name on it, right under the curve of its left wing.

_Why is it a duck, though?_ Keith had asked the first time Shiro explained it to him, and all Shiro had been able to do was shrug and laugh.)

So, the duck sat on the corner of Keith’s desk, and every time he sat down to do physics problems or revise his notes or pore over flight plans for a sim practical, he could feel its beady little eyes on him. He didn’t exactly find its frozen plastic smile motivating, except for the fact that it reminded him of Shiro, that it felt, somehow, like a little piece of Shiro himself left behind to study with him just like he always used to. It felt a little silly even to think about it that way, but Keith couldn’t deny that it made his chest feel warm, that whenever he hit a snarl in his work and couldn’t figure out how to solve a problem or couldn’t force himself to remember a definition and wished, more than anything, that Shiro wasn’t off on his way to the ass-end of the solar system but instead was right here in his shitty dorm room where Keith had gotten so _used_ to him, he would look at the stupid duck, all covered up in messy Sharpie marks, and he would feel just a little bit better.

iv.

The Kerberos mission had been away for months already when Keith found the photos.

They were tucked into the front cover of one of Shiro’s old textbooks, a thick, dusty old thing about experimental aircraft and test flying that he’d given to Keith because “even if you don’t end up needing it for a class, it’s actually really interesting — no, seriously, I mean it! I know it’s a textbook, but still!” Keith wasn’t even trying to read the book, he was just moving some shit around because trying to make the most efficient use of the tiny amount of space allotted to cadets was a never-ending struggle, and the strip of pictures just fell right out and onto the floor.

He recognized them even before he bent over to pick them up, and he felt torn between a smile and a scowl. It had been Shiro’s idea, initially, to go into the photobooth, a slightly dilapidated-looking thing that they’d happened past one of the times Shiro had dragged him out into town. Keith had suspected at the time, and still suspected, that it had only ever been an attempt to tease him, but once Shiro got him to agree, he was fully committed, and he’d ended up being the one dictating their poses for each shot, shoving Shiro around until he had him where he wanted him. There were four pictures, stacked one on top of the other with a cheerful little border of stars and moons around the whole lot. The last two were his favorites: Shiro making a faux-serious face while giving Keith bunny ears as Keith rolled his eyes, and then below it, Keith socking him on the shoulder, mouth open around a shout while Shiro laughed.

What, exactly, he’d been yelling had long since faded from his memory, but he remembered how he’d felt, the dizzy, warm feeling fizzing under his skin as he pressed up next to Shiro shoulder-to-hip, because God only knew those photobooths weren’t really designed for Shiro-sized people, and he remembered what Shiro’s laugh had sounded like, how it had settled somewhere behind his lungs and lived there for the rest of the night.

He shoved the photos back into the book and snapped the cover shut as quickly as though he’d been burned.

v.

It wasn’t so much that Shiro _left_ his dog tags as it was that Keith stole them.

He didn’t wear them, not at first. He just — he wanted to have them, wanted to be able to press his thumb down hard and feel Shiro’s name and Garrison ID number and date of birth imprinted into his skin, all these little details that made him up branded onto Keith, at least for a little while. If he couldn’t have the real Shiro, if he was going to be up in the stars and out of reach, then at least he could have the tiny bits of Shiro that his tags offered. He kept them hanging around his bedpost, and there were more than a few nights where he fell asleep with them clenched tightly in his fist.

And then they stopped getting messages back from Kerberos. It was subtle, at first, just a lack of updates when normally the Garrison loved to spout out as many little sound bites about the mission’s progress — carefully sanitized to make sure no classified data got out, of course — as possible, but Keith knew. He could feel it, right away; he could feel that something was wrong, could see it in the set of the officers’ spines and the way they all started to look away when they saw him. 

Keith tried not to think to hard about it the first time he slipped the dog tags over his head. He tried not to catalogue the way they clanked hollowly against his own, the way the chain felt around his neck, the way his heart pounded at the very idea of wearing Shiro’s name over his chest like he had some claim to it. Like he had some claim to Shiro himself. Like the tags were proof, somehow, that Shiro was real, that Shiro was real and _coming back_ , because Keith had stolen these from him, and he needed to knock on the door and shoot him a stupid grin and roll his eyes and steal them right back. 

He didn’t let himself think about that too hard, though, becuase… because what was the alternative?

+i.

They gave him a chance — a very brief chance — to pack his things before he was summarily booted from Garrison property. Except ‘his things’ ended up not even really being _his_ things, at least not mostly. He left most of his textbooks, most of his clothes — not like he needed Garrison cadet uniforms anymore anyway — but he packed every single thing Shiro had left him into a cardboard box, except for the hoverbike, of course. He put the box _onto_ the hoverbike.

And now, here he was, out in the desert, in something that only _barely_ counted as a shack, let alone a house (though, God, at the moment he was just glad it was still standing), with a box of things that used to be Shiro’s, with Shiro’s dog tags biting into his neck like shards of ice, with Shiro’s bike outside, with the words _pilot error_ ringing in his ears no matter how much he tried to ignore them.

He kicked out at the box in a fit of frustration and despair, sending it scooting a couple of inches across the floor with a dull _thunk_. Was he going to have to go to the storage locker and get Shiro’s stuff from there, too? Was he going to have to sort through it all, piece by piece, touching the things Shiro had touched, surrounded by the fragments of his life, the flotsam and jetsam left behind? 

Stupidly, ridiculously, _that_ was what made him well and truly break down. Well. Okay. He had broken down sometime around punching Iverson, probably, but the thought of a storage locker standing cold and empty somewhere, with every tangible thing that was left of Shiro cleared out of it by Keith’s own hands, the thought of being forced to dismantle him like that — _that_ was what made him finally start to cry.

He dug through the box with shaking hands, his fingers fumbling across the blunt ceramic lip of a mug and skidding roughly over the cover of an old book, not sure what he was searching for, not sure if there was even anything to find. Keith had lost people before; sometimes it felt like all he _ever_ did was lose people, but this... It was as though the last of his stars had gone out.

_Stupid_ , he thought, swiping angrily at his eyes and leaning back and kicking the box away again. There was nothing in there that could make him feel better, nothing in there that really held any hint of Shiro at all anymore. He was _gone_ — the Garrison was hiding something, sure, and Keith didn’t believe in ‘pilot error’ for even a second, but Shiro was still gone, and no trinket or treasure could bring him back. None of these things could fill up the room with his presence. None of them could even really keep the memory of him alive. All of this stuff… without Shiro, it was all just junk. Just junk that had been left behind.

Keith didn’t look in that box again for a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like, you can always find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/akaparalian) and [Tumblr](http://floralegia.tumblr.com), and I have a [Ko-Fi](http://ko-fi.com/akaparalian) as well, if you're so inclined.


End file.
